fountainhead from which the authority of all future Parliaments
must be derived, and that on the validity of the votes of the
Convention must depend the validity of every future statute. And
how could the stream rise higher than the source? Was it not
absurd to say that the Convention was supreme in the state, and
yet a nullity; a legislature for the highest of all purposes, and
yet no legislature for the humblest purposes; competent to
declare the throne vacant, to change the succession, to fix the
landmarks of the constitution, and yet not competent to pass the
most trivial Act for the repairing of a pier or the building of a
parish church?

These arguments would have had considerable weight, even if every
precedent had been on the other side. But in truth our history
afforded only one precedent which was at all in point; and that
precedent was decisive in favour of the doctrine that royal writs
are not indispensably necessary to the existence of a Parliament.
No royal writ had summoned the Convention which recalled Charles
the Second. Yet that Convention had, after his Restoration,
continued to sit and to legislate, had settled the revenue, had
passed an Act of amnesty, had abolished the feudal tenures. These
proceedings had been sanctioned by authority of which no party in
the state could speak without reverence. Hale had borne a
considerable share in them, and had always maintained that they
were strictly legal. Clarendon, little as he was inclined to
favour any doctrine derogatory to the rights of the Crown, or to
the dignity of that seal of which he was keeper, had declared
that, since God had, at a most critical conjuncture, given the
nation a good Parliament, it would be the height of folly to look
for technical flaws in the instrument by which that Parliament